


When

by magikfanfic



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Backstory, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Pre-Rogue One, Sexual Situations, blood mentions, death mentions, probably not canon compliant, slightly codependent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-20
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-16 16:56:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11257056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magikfanfic/pseuds/magikfanfic
Summary: “I think I. I think,” he stammers, straining to put things into words, and then losing his senses completely when Chirrut’s teeth sink into his neck and the heel of his hand presses against him. The combination of sensations is almost enough to make stars bloom behind his eyelids when he slams them shut, and the mean that Chirrut pulls from him is breathy and long and deep enough that Baze wonders whether it comes from the heart of their moon itself, funneled through him somehow.





	When

**Author's Note:**

> So. This one. I'm just going to leave it here. I'm sorry that it's painful. I don't know what happened. This is not what I intended at all, but it's what we got. I'll go work on something better now.

“I think I. I think,” he stammers, straining to put things into words, and then losing his senses completely when Chirrut’s teeth sink into his neck and the heel of his hand presses against Baze’s erection, trapped in his pants. The combination of sensations is almost enough to make stars bloom behind his eyelids when he slams them shut, and the moan that Chirrut pulls from him is breathy and long and deep enough that Baze wonders whether it comes from the heart of their moon itself, funneled through him somehow.

“You think too much,” Chirrut mutters, the frequent accusation made softer by the way his tongue sweeps over the flesh of Baze’s neck, licking across the mark he just made.

And it's a fair point because Baze lives inside his head, gets lost exploring the caverns of his own thoughts and worries and concerns. He speaks little, which frustrates Chirrut sometimes, though he has been trying to be better about it. “I think I love you,” he forces out because three of those words are damning in the wrong light. Or the right light. Baze isn't completely sure, has spent entirely too long mulling it over without coming to any discernible conclusion.

From his position atop Baze, seemingly trying to cover every inch of him with his own body, Chirrut just huffs and presses the heel of his hand back against Baze’s trapped erection, pulling a sharp curse from Baze’s lips that instantly makes him blush even more fiercely than before. “Of course. I knew that. Bother me with new revelations when you find some, Malbus. I'm currently mastering physical worship.”

How Chirrut manages to not lose all his words, all his finesse is beyond him. Baze whose brain starts stuttering, shaking apart, losing sense and meaning the moment Chirrut looks at him, smiles at him, the barest hint of skin to skin contact. Yet Chirrut can seemingly keep up five conversations with his hand on Baze’s cock and that is supremely unfair. It just makes this all the more wanton, more desirable, better somehow, though Baze would never admit to any of that.

Chirrut’s nonchalant, flippant answer, however, bothers him, rakes unwelcome jealousy and fear through his stomach such that it quivers in an unpleasant way that has him pulling away a little. He knows, of course, that he is not Chirrut’s first lover. He knows too that there is a difference between the love that he feels for his fellow initiates and the love he feels for Chirrut. There is a difference too between wanting to crawl into Chirrut’s skin versus wanting to crawl into his soul and Baze has always, perhaps embarrassingly, wanted the latter from the first moment that Chirrut wavered and kissed him. He feels like his affections are plain, writ large across his face, laced into every word he utters and every move he makes, but Chirrut, like a cloudy stream, confuses him, and he can't discern how deep the water goes and what lies beneath. Will it be shallow and lovely, pleasant and cool? Or will it be a drop off and jagged rocks and a hole to slip so far into that he will never be seen again? (Would the latter really be so bad?)

He knows that Chirrut loves him, but Chirrut loves everyone, everything. That's the Force in him, Baze thinks, moving through him in gleaming, shining, effervescent wonder. But Baze wants more than just the Force love reserved for everyone. He wants Chirrut. Chirrut’s love. Chirrut’s heart. Wants it greedily and completely and all for himself in a way that scares him, especially when given voice like this, though he knows that he has to try before it grows too large and overwhelms him like a strangler vine.

His words stumble, trip, break in his throat such that he feels like he is spitting shards of crockery when he speaks. “No. I. Chirrut. I think I'm in love. With you.”

Chirrut, lips kiss dark and swollen, eyes blown with wanton desire, skin flushed to a shade of rose gold that Baze would happily give up all other colors to live in forever, pulls back, stops moving, almost seems to stop breathing.

And Baze wants to pull the words back in, swallow them, eat all that jagged clay and let it rip pieces of his insides apart as it descends into the darkness of his interior world. As much as Baze wants to hear the words back--and he does, he wants to, his heart and his soul are clamoring for it--he would give that up if it would somehow manage to ease this strange look from Chirrut’s face that he can’t quite parse. Baze catches Chirrut’s face with his hands, slides thumbs over his cheekbones and across his mouth and hopes that he won’t pull away from him before he can fix it. “I don’t. You don’t. I just wanted to say it. It’s not. It’s not important.”

It is important, but it is not important enough to break everything to pieces. It is not more important than Chirrut and not making this strange, though it is already strange, that does not mean he has to call that strangeness out, hold it up to the light, examine it. Baze knows that he cannot just put this in a box now, the way that he puts so many things in boxes, and hide it away to deal with later because his confession has spilled across the floor, across the walls, across everything. Now it has to be dealt with. And Baze has never been very good at that.

Chirrut has practically shrunk to the size of his breathing, which still comes faster than normal, as though he has been running for a very long time, as though he has been training hard. As though he is upset and seconds from crying, something Baze has not seen since they were very small, and Chirrut, prone to fits of riotous anger, a seesaw of flickering emotions, sad greater than any other sadness in the world and rage as bright as a lantern, would get easily overwhelmed by the press of everything. In those years before he learned mastery of his mind and his heart before he took the Force’s hand to let it led him where it wanted. “When?” Chirrut’s voice, when it comes, seems flat and unlike him.

“I’m sorry?” Sometimes Chirrut jumps ten paces ahead in the conversation, and Baze cannot find his footing, is always left mired in the mud, his brain too thick and systematic for the sharp changes, the quick corners. It is even harder to keep up now when those words have been loosed, and Chirrut looks poised on the brink of something, and Baze wants to cower and kiss both at the same time.This is a path with too many forks, and Baze feels stuck at the crossroad, wringing his hands, fretting about the decision in front of him.

“When did you know?” Chirrut clarifies, his voice giving little away except for his breathing, quick and sharp like the raps of his staff against Baze’s chest and knees when they spar.

When, the word tickles through his bloodstream, arches through his bones, travels into each patch of skin and makes the hair on his arms jump like they do in the hours before lightning swarms across the sky during the rainy season. When. Baze presses his tongue against it over and over in much the same way that he explored the hole left in his jaw when they pulled out one of his back teeth, gone bad inside of his mouth, though he had shouldered the pain for weeks before Chirrut tugged him to the healers. He hadn’t wanted to be a bother. Sometimes Chirrut’s tongue finds that empty space when they kiss and he laps at it greedily as though it is just something else he aims to fill in Baze’s life. Baze never knew there were so many holes to be found until Chirrut crawled into every single one of them, though he has never been able to ask if it was on purpose or just because Chirrut, like a loth cat, fits in everything, leaves nothing unexplored.

When. There are too many answers and not enough answers all at the same time, and Baze wonders how it is that his mind works like this, how it provides too much information but details that feel paltry and unworthy. Forever lingers on the edge of his tongue, something easy enough to admit to but not specific. Surely not specific enough for Chirrut who adores details and words, who drinks them greedily when he can get them, who is always plying Baze for more, more stories, more feelings, more desires, more information. Also more kisses, more touches. Chirrut is seemingly never satisfied and this realization has made Baze’s blood boil happily in his veins on several occasions since this dance began.

No, forever will not sate him, will only turn one question into a whole barrage of them. So Baze has to prepare more than that even though sitting in silence is making Chirrut squirm and fidget, which makes it harder for Baze to concentrate when they are pressed together like this and every shift of Chirrut’s hips provides friction and the reminder of Chirrut’s cock just as hard as his own. Physical worship Chirrut had said, and Baze thinks of the two of them Chirrut is the one to be worshiped even though that is hedging on blasphemy. Patience is a color that Chirrut has never worn without complaint, and he grinds his hips into Baze again as though thinking the physical reminder of where they left off when all this muddy conversation started will hasten the process.

Baze’s answer is a groan because it is hard to think of anything but Chirrut when he is so close. Actually these days it is hard to think of anything but Chirrut at all, which is why they are here, frozen in wait instead of naked and gasping into each other’s mouths as hands linger and bodies press against each other. He just had to open his mouth, didn’t he? He just had to speak the words that had been crowding their way onto his tongue again and again over the past few weeks, words that he had been able to suppress until today, tuck them into the hollow of his cheeks or under his tongue or in the back of his throat to caress the head of Chirrut’s cock when he took it into his mouth. So much time spent hiding it in plain sight that he thought well. He thought Chirrut might have caught on. But Chirrut sometimes has trouble paying attention to things that are not shiny, that do not gleam with an inner light as brilliant as his own. Force knows that Baze is anything but that. Chirrut is polished kyber crystals, and Baze is the rock surrounding them, too dull to even reflect the light back, basking in its glow, wanting it.

The exhalation of air through Chirrut’s nostrils is frustrated and forced and means more than any combination of words that he could string together in that moment. Baze knows them all anyway. He is taking too long, lingering in front of the pathways, and pretty soon Chirrut will pick for him. This is not always the preferable outcome to a situation.

He forges ahead.

“When you volunteered for kitchen duty during the week of my birthday so you could swap out the tarine tea for jasmine.” It had been years ago, but Baze has never forgotten how appealing the scent was when he lifted the cup to his lips, how wonderful the taste had been on that first day when he had been expecting the awful tarine tea that he forced down because it was given to him, and there was no room for waste in the life of the devoted. Chirrut had been banned from kitchen duty since, but that had not stopped the jasmine tea from coming because now the other knew how to make it, how to brew it using the plants in the temple garden, and Baze could have it whenever he wanted.

Baze walks his fingers across Chirrut’s neck, his eyes focused on the skin there instead of the other’s face because he is not sure what he will find lingering in his eyes and whether or not he can continue speaking if he sees it. “When you missed the test for your fourth duan to keep me company while I was ill and read passages from the ancient texts aloud even though they bored you but because you knew they comforted me. You sang while I slept. I remember sleeping very lightly, on the cusp of sinking into fever dreams, nightmares, rising and falling, being led away from the worst of it by the sound of your voice.”

Chirrut’s fingers catch at his own, wind through them, hold his hand so tightly that Baze wonders what is behind the show of strength. It is not painful or forceful. There is something in it that he would qualify as desperation in someone else yet that is not a word that he would ever ascribe to Chirrut. Despite this, he finds that he still cannot look at him, cannot run the risk of having his words stolen by whatever perfect or stormy cloud has gathered in Chirrut’s eyes, has pulled at his mouth. The other’s breathing is still stilted and fast, still breathy and unknown. When he speaks, his voice catches as though he has eaten the shattered clay that Baze felt choked with mere moments ago. “You are the only one who likes my singing.”

“Some sing more sweetly, but no one’s voice is dear to me as yours. I would gather it up and fill my ears with it and hear nothing but you for the rest of time if I could.” That is, perhaps, entirely too much, but Baze is starting to feel split open like an overripe fruit fallen from a stall in the marketplace, juices and pulp everywhere, cloying scent heavy in the air such that anyone close can see all of it secrets, all of its insides spread out on the ground. He feels like that with Chirrut sometimes, exposed and revealed, pulled free from all the many ways that he has found to hide. Exposed but not in danger. Although now. He feels a little like he might be in danger now. Because there is so much at stake here. He is poised to lose so much if this goes awry.

Oh, he should have shuttered his lips when he had the chance, forced the words to another part of his body where Chirrut would never seek it out, never brush against it accidentally. Except that he would, wouldn’t he? Bit by bit, Chirrut is taking over everything about him, and Baze cannot even pretend to mind. This is how love is, he supposes, being overwhelmed by something so completely and not only being fine with that but wanting it. And hoping with everything inside of yourself that the other person feels the same way.

He clears his throat and closes his eyes, focuses on the fact that Chirrut’s grip never falters even though it aches a little as if Chirrut is trying to grind his bones together, prove something in some language that Baze does not understand yet, may never understand. Or perhaps, like Baze, he is just hanging for dear life, scared to let go. This is a strange thought to have about Chirrut who never seems shaken. “When you kissed me. My heart beat so fast that I thought it might burst inside of my chest, and I was okay with that because you had kissed me. And I didn’t know how much I wanted it until you did.” His voice slips a bit, turns huskier and afraid. “I didn’t know how much I wanted you until you did. And now I don’t know if I want anything other than you.”

There are, of course, other whens. There is a whole litany of them, and Baze wonders if he should have gone through more of them before getting to that one. He could have talked about the night they snuck out to tiptoe into the kyber caves, the way that Chirrut’s hand had closed about his wrist in utter joy as they stood there in their sleep robes surrounded by the Force, by the living, breathing pulse of it, and Baze had felt so lost that he thought he would have floated into the ether if it had not been for the solid reminder of Chirrut’s clenched fingers on him. It is a grip very similar to the one the other has him in now, he thinks.

He is afraid, but he looks. He is worried, but he looks. He tilts his head so that he can catch a glimpse of Chirrut’s face, Chirrut’s eyes, and what he finds takes his breath away. It is Chirrut with eyes dark and wide and mesmerized as though someone has opened a door inside of him. Chirrut is always bright and charming and quick-witted, but there can be sharp points in his eyes. If Baze’s eyes are always wet, then Chirrut’s are always honed and careful. Baze gives everything away with a glance while Chirrut exposes nothing that he doesn’t want shown. What he shows now is a flood, a cascade, though Baze isn’t completely positive that these are waters he knows how to navigate, fears they might be dark and bottomless, that they could pull him under.

I cannot breathe water, he thinks in the space between the glance and any words that either of them can utter. I cannot breathe water, but I would learn how to. For you.

Their first devotion is meant to be to the temple, but one look at Chirrut’s face, the feel of his hand, the thought of his lips, and his body, and Baze isn’t sure how much of his devotion can be focused on anything else anymore. Chirrut loves everything around him because he is full of the Force, and the Force loves everything. Baze tries, but he is not flush with it in the same way. He is full of love for smaller things. For the petals in the breeze and the silence on the upper balconies when the world is dark and the stars glitter like the lights in Chirrut’s eyes. But he falters when he tries to love other things like the noise of the marketplace and the crush of all the people there. He becomes irritable and short tempered. He loses sight of his faith because of his own discomfort.

He fails. But no matter how many times Baze fails, he always gets up, he always tries again. One day he will love completely and unselfishly. One day he will love as the Force loves.

This is not that day. This day he finds that he only loves Chirrut. The way the flush is high on his perfect cheeks, the way his eyelashes seem to brush against his skin like flowers, the enticing quirk of his lips. Baze loves each and everything about him. The answer to when is now. The answer to when is yesterday and the day before that and the week before that and the month prior and the year. And the answer to when is tomorrow and the next day. Until there are no more days. Until there is nothing else except the Force.

Until they are twined together there.

It is after he makes that realization that it happens, crowds into his mind, pushy as the wind. An explosion. Explosions. Voices yelling, muffled but known. He would know those voices anywhere. The feel of weight in his arms and a rending in his heart. Pain. Lots of pain. More pain than he has ever felt before in his life, enough that he wonders how he can scratch his way through it to the other side. Except he does. In a way. And then there is just a pulse, just a voice, just a knowing of togetherness, the sort that speaks of never ending because there is nothing else that can happen.

“Oh,” he gasps, the sound little more than an exhalation but loud enough that Chirrut hears and squeezes even harder. When Baze’s mind stumbles, jerks, clatters out of the vision with an almost audible crash, he focuses on Chirrut’s eyes again, and this time they are wet. “Chirrut. When?”

Chirrut is still breathing in that labored fashion only now it seems closer to sobbing than anything else, though no tears leave his eyes. Mastery of the physical is another place where Chirrut excels. When he swallows it seems to be with great effort, and his other hand, the one not squeezing itself knuckle white around Baze’s own, catches the back of Baze’s neck and pulls him closer so that they are forehead to forehead, where all they can breathe is each other. “Not anytime soon,” he says, and there should be celebration in that, but Baze can not get beyond the sadness, the palpable realization of the vision shared.

“When did you know?” Now it feels like all his words are rising through a throat torn and burned. There is smoke in his nostrils, and he swears that he can hear the crunch of boots on sand in the middle distance. It is not the first time that Chirrut has dragged him into the Force with him, reached out and tugged him into a vision or a dream, but most of those were different than this experience. When they were little, it was Chirrut reaching out because he was alone and frightened and needed a hand to hold even if Baze never felt like he could make much of a difference whether in the real word or in the Force itself. As they got older, it was less frequent, mostly just the occasional vision, sometimes other dreams, sweltering dreams that neither of them acknowledged, dreams that Baze thought might have only been in his own mind until Chirrut’s gaze would skitter away from his during meals in the dining hall the next day and then he knew that it was not just a dream.

When Chirrut speaks, his words stick together like rice cooked too long. “I touched your hand when you were seven, and I was six, and the world shattered into something else. I was too young to know what it meant. When I turned twelve, it happened again, and it was full of rain. Shots in the rain. Not the rain on Jedha. I was scared, and I didn’t know what it meant. I was fifteen, I touched your arm, and my body felt like it was on fire, and my heart felt like it would break. Other people didn’t feel like that. Only you.”

Baze is silent, listening, watching, trying to remember the moments that Chirrut speaks of but lost in a whirlpool of emotions and a lifetime of strands twisted together that he never saw before. Now that Chirrut has shown him, now that the Force has shown him, he will never be able to blink them away again, they will remain in his vision like afterimages from looking at the sun too long.

“Other people were safer. You were a plain strewn with mines that I couldn’t keep myself from walking across. I tried to get lost in other people.” Here Baze’s heart lurches again, and Chirrut’s fingers squeeze as though he is willing their skin to fuse together from the pressure alone, for them to disappear into each other. “I know it hurt you,” Chirrut continues. “I am sorry, my song. All I wanted was to protect you from it. Surely, I thought, none of that can come to pass if I keep my distance, but trying to stay away from you was like trying to stop breathing.”

His heart is so full it feels like it will burst, it feels like it will blossom and bloom, a flower unfurling until the petals claw out of his throat to brush across Chirrut’s cheeks and wipe away the occasional tear that manages to seep from the corners of his eyes. This is where he should be the support, where he should comfort, where he should hush him and tell him that it is alright, he doesn’t need any of this, not really, he just needs Chirrut. But Baze can be greedy, and he wants to know. “What changed?”

Chirrut’s laugh is full of bliss and something darker, an edge, a switch. “I kissed you,” he admits, voice as lilting as any song. “I kissed you, and it was everything that nothing else had ever been. It was not,” the hand clenches against the back of Baze’s neck, a twinge of fine pleasure pain. “It was not the fire or the shattering or the rain. It was us laughing. It was us, hand in hand, and my chest felt so full of wonder it was like I was full of the Force for the first time in my life. I understood the entire universe. I understand the entire universe. In you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

This time the laugh is a little hysterical and Baze understands because he feels like that himself, undone, unsure, pushed to the limit, overwhelmed. It is something that he does not usually see on Chirrut, though, and he cradles the other’s cheek with his free hand, swipes errant tears away with his thumb, touches before he can wonder whether the caress will spark something bad, feels eased when Chirrut leans into it as though nothing in the world is as pleasant. “It seemed like too much, and I wanted. I wanted you to love me because of me and not because of what the Force had told me. I think I hoped that if you did not love me back then it would not come true.”

Baze doesn’t need him to elaborate. He saw the vision as well. He knows what the future holds, the bombs and the blood and the shots, the beach, and the death and the reconnecting in the place where nothing and everything exists. Maybe in a smarter person, it would be enough to scare them away, but Baze only has eyes for Chirrut, only knows that he cannot imagine stepping back, especially now. “You were protecting me.”

“Always. You are very tall, Baze Malbus, and very strong, but your soul is in your eyes, and your heart is as vulnerable as any sapling. The universe would make short work of you without me. I will protect you with every breath I take in whatever fashion I can. Until you will not let me anymore.” There is a hint of the normal Chirrut in those words, teasing, joking even when every syllable is truth and heavy, so full of feeling that he cannot say it any other way than lightly.

“You said it will be some time from now?” His thumb moves across Chirrut’s cheek, down until it can trail over his bottom lip, leave the other gasping a little, clambering closer still, legs straddling his lap.

When Chirrut speaks, it is husky and wanton, sounds bruised and swollen, they way his lips look after kissing. “Yes.”

“What about the time until then?”

“It is what we make of it.”

Baze thinks of all the things they could make of it, of all the ways they could try and change it, run their heads up against one wall after another. He wonders if any of it would do anything at all. And then he thinks that it would be such a waste of time. The pain was sharp, yes, and the smell of smoke still seems to linger in his hair, but it was not the end. He would rather spend all their moments like this, curled together, Chirrut crushing his hand, Chirrut pulled into his lap, Chirrut’s lips right there close enough to kiss, close enough to claim. He could spend the moments between then and now worrying, fretting, running, trying to change something that might not even be alterable, or he could focus on what is in his arms, on what is right in front of him. “I go where you go,” he says, whispers right into the perfect shell of Chirrut’s ear and feels him shudder against him, wonders if the other knew what he would say before he even did so. Not that it matters. It doesn’t dull his words or their message any less. The words are a promise as potent as any declaration of love, perhaps more so.

“I love you, my song,” Chirrut’s voice is fierce, a freshly sharpened knife, a flash of too bright teeth in a false smile, a foot striding forward to put himself in harm’s way before Baze can move, a shield. “I am one with the Force.”

“The Force is with me,” Baze finishes for him, a prayer, a vow, a falling.

When does not matter. When will come crawling eventually in its own time. And when will find them together at the end as at the beginning. In the past, and in the present, and in the future. Before and after and beyond when itself. Baze believes this as surely as he knows that his heart beats, as surely as he knows that he will never kiss anyone other than Chirrut, that he will linger in the fall of those eyelashes forever until forever is wiped away and there is only the mingling of energy together in the Force, in the universe itself.


End file.
